


Better Now That There's No You

by TrenchcoatRats



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Skids Lives, Canonical Character Death, Gen, M/M, for everyone BUT skids, let skids have a happy ending and some level of closure 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:28:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27899860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrenchcoatRats/pseuds/TrenchcoatRats
Summary: My entry in the Transformers AU Zine "Homemade" : An alternate universe where Skids' story ends differently in mtmte...in that it doesn't end. Meaningful conversations with Nautica and, surprisingly enough Megatron, may be exactly what he needs to keep going.
Relationships: (hinted at and past), Getaway/Skids (Transformers), Glitch | Damus/Skids
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4
Collections: HOMEMADE: A Transformers AU Zine





	Better Now That There's No You

**Author's Note:**

> For the 2020 Transfomers Homemade AU Zine! It was a fantastic project and I'm so grateful for spreading my self-indulgent "Skids deserves a happier ending" propaganda!

When the pain first hits, Skids tries to focus on the present. He tries to think of Nautica, his now amica, he tries to think of Drift, finally returned after so long. He doesn’t think about Getaway. He tries thinking of Brainstorm’s ideas and quick work that might save the day or at least buy them enough time to think the day’s saved--and thinking of Brainstorm is a mistake. It makes him think of Quark. It makes him think about what happened to Quark.

What he let happen.

The pain becomes agony.

He distantly feels Ratchet’s servos on his head and they burn.

His past, present, and future are engulfed in the flame of failure as scene after scene play out and bleed together in his head. Throwing himself off the medical table feels like nothing in comparison. How could he ever claim to still feel pain for what he’s done? He’s scum, scum, scum scum scum scumscumscumscum. 

And only two beings know it.

Only two beings know what happened to Quark, and even though it won’t make him any less of scum, he can do everything to make that wrong right.

Ratchet moves to grab him, pull him upright and back to the table and it burns his back. He can smell the melting plating and though Ratchet’s mouth is moving all he can hear is screaming. Screaming and music.

This is now twice he’s been betrayed by those he’s loved. Glitch and Getaway remain out of reach, untouchable through the slaughters they’ve both conducted. A horrifying symphony that Skids has read the sheet music for, played along for a few measures to.

He wants the music to end, but he can’t die just yet. He has to find Brainstorm, has to tell him.

He feels the ground shake faintly from the battle outside and slowly focuses his optics on the present. There’s Ratchet, talking to him in a fast, panicked way, and Megatron is not too far away, but getting further by the second. Ratchet hasn’t noticed yet, too busy with his uncooperative patient. 

Skids really should apologize for being a burden, for making what’s sure to be Ratchet’s last moments that much more stressful and painful for him. But apologies don’t really mean anything and the words die in his throat, clinging there as if they were ash.

All he can do is try to make sure that those who died in Grindcore don’t continue to go unremembered and lost to the universe.

Skids tries to focus on the present, it seems important. He calls for help-- to get him back up? Possibly. Ratchet scowls and tries to hide the fear welling in him as he grumbles and mutters to himself, “Oh so now he goes after Tarn.”

Skids’ frame suddenly seizes, going ramrod straight at the mention of that name. Skids forces his mouth to move, bites the name out. Ratchet looks down at him in surprise, at his tone, his cognizance, the fact he’s still alive, maybe all of them at once. But Skids ignores him and says the name again. And again. And again. He goes to say it a fifth time but the wrong one spills out. Glitch.

The last part of the name is forced out through tears suddenly welling up, followed by harsh sobs. Skids lets his frame go limp as Ratchet enlists Velocity’s help in getting him back up on the table. He doesn’t stop crying, and he doesn’t stop remembering, but he does start thinking.

And now, things change.

Now, all Skids can do is keep living.

He drifts in and out, flooded with memories and emotions he wishes he had never gone searching for. It would be worse if it was all bad times, but there were good times in the before and after and foolishly optimistic times during. Each day he survived had always felt like a victory, an accomplishment, even a blessing. Others paid for his naivety with their lives and he had repaid them by forgetting. He wouldn’t forget this time, he wouldn’t let the memories drown him either. He had to keep going until his friends were gone. As long as he lived, they had a fighting chance. As long as he lived, he could try and do better.

He forces himself to try and come out of it at Ratchet and Velocity’s obvious worry. Two medics doubt his chances...once it would have been a challenge, now it’s just something else to contend with. He forces his face into something resembling stability, it only makes them look more worried. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

His one-bot comedy show is halted when some of the crew come sliding in, a small frame cradled in Rodimus’ arms as Velocity guides him to a table to place the body for her to ease the passing. There’s no way to survive those wounds, especially not in the here and now.

A shadow’s cast over his face of a familiar frame: Nautica. He looks up at her, but she’s looking at Ratchet who shakes his head sadly. He doesn’t need the pair of arms suddenly gripping him in a tight hug, as if he’d escape with any less pressure, to tell him what the gesture meant. That doesn’t mean it goes unappreciated, though.

“Please don’t cry.” He croaks out, startling Nautica. “If you start crying, then I’ll start crying, and soon everyone’ll start crying and it’ll just be too much.”

Nautica lets go of him with one arm to wipe at her face where tears had indeed started gathering. “ ‘Too much’? You’re on your deathbed and you’re worried about people making too much of a scene for you? I can’t believe you sometimes.” Her tone is teasing but it falls flat when she bites her lip and starts holding back tears again.

“There’s more important things going on right now,” He mutters despondently, his gaze darting out to the screens where Megatron takes up the display. He knows Tarn’s not too far behind and slumps in Nautica’s hold. He then registers Brainstorm right by the monitor and begins struggling. 

“Hey! What do you think you’re doing?! Are you trying to get yourself killed?” Nautica moves to hold him tighter, keep him from wiggling out, as if he could. She always found a way to surprise him when he was least expecting it. He registers her rhetorical question and bites his lip, says nothing. Optics still trained on Brainstorm as if he can send him the memories and knowledge through gaze alone. He hears Nautica say a quiet, broken, “Oh, Skids” before she’s wrapping herself back around him. He feels her frame shaking and presses his face against her shoulder, letting his own tears form and fall now that she can’t see them.

“It’s my fault. With Getaway, with Brainstorm, with-with Tarn. It’s all my fault.” The truth is spoken so quietly that he doesn’t even know if Nautica can hear them. She doesn’t make any movement to suggest that she does. But after a beat of silence, she responds, just as quietly.

“What makes you think that?”

And he tells her. Everything he’s known and everything he’s remembered. Nights filled with love and laughter that turned to screams and misery and betrayal. Of your partner knowing you when you don’t know yourself and that disadvantage turning into a betrayal in and of itself. How he’s trying to survive for others and who those others are. He lets name after name fall from his mouth until he can only remember one more. The last, but no less important for it. He can feel Nautica start at the name and know she recognizes it too.

He expects her to pull away, Brainstorm is her amica too and she knows what Quark means to him. But instead she lifts her face from him and keeps one arm holding tight to him while the other moves up to cup his cheek. He looks at her and hates himself just a bit more for making her cry like this.

“I wasn’t there with you when this happened, any of this. But that doesn’t mean that this is your fault. None of this was your fault. You didn’t do anything to deserve this happening to you and you shouldn’t blame yourself for others hurting you and forcing you into impossible decisions.”

“...I wish I could believe you.” He really, really does.

A compressed eternity passes between them, no further words, just silent physical comfort and grief written in their frames and every microexpression they make. The moment is shattered, however, when Skids hears That Name. And then it’s time to face the music.

“So what’s his real name then?” Velocity asks. Nautica looks at Skids who returns her gaze.

“You don’t have to do this.” She says neutrally. He appreciates that.

“I know.” He tries to smile at her, it comes just a bit easier. She looks at him in a mix of sadness and fondness as she helps him to a sitting position.

“It’s ‘Glitch’,” he starts, grabbing everyone’s attention. “Or, Damus I guess. But we all called him Glitch. He liked it.” 

Ratchet looks to him furiously like a medic seconds from a rampage before pausing to register what Skids said. The fight leaves him for a moment in favor of exhaustion as he clenches his servos and looks at Skids with a mix of pity and understanding. Seems they’ve both been burned by lovers.

Maybe one day he’ll be able to pat himself on the back for that pun.

“That answers Velocity’s question but opens up at least twenty more.” Rodimus mutters, looking at Skids before darting his gaze away like Skids will be fine if he just doesn’t look at him. It’s a sweet sentiment in a very Rodimus way.

“You know him?” Drift asks gently, optics still on the screen.

“I did.” Skids follows Drift’s example and watches the slaughter of the DJD. There was nothing more he could say.

The last words Glitch hears, Skids thinks, are as brutal as anything he could have ever come up with himself. He starts laughing, the silence of the crew shattered by the sound. Everyone’s looking at him, even Ravage raises his head slightly. Amongst them all, he thinks that cat is the only one who gets what’s so funny.

He stops laughing eventually, just a twisting of the lips that looks as painful as it feels. But even that falls when Megatron comes back. There’s a horribly familiar mask on his chest over where the Autobot symbol is. He knows, knows, that with the kind of violence the DJD indulged in masks must get broken and damaged all the time. But an achingly raw part of himself, eager to be hurt again, wonders if this is the same mask he had gazed at day after day in Grindcore. 

When he comes back to the present, Ravage is dead. Ravage is dead and Megatron is boiling over with fury and grief, ready to explode. It’s a familiar heat, but lacking any real direction. Maybe that’s why he feels at ease interrupting him as Megatron announces his departure.

“I know you want to leave, but I’m asking you to wait, just for a minute.” He sighs and meets Megatron’s gaze head on, exhausted but not weak. “I’m sorry that you’ve had to hear so many last words today, but I’m not sorry that I’m going to ask to add to it.”

The silence in the room is less like someone died and more like there’s no one left alive. He doesn’t have the energy to read the emotions on Megatron’s faceplate during their stare off, not even broken when Nautica sighs and calls for everyone to clear the room. The medics are the last of the crew to leave, with Rodimus leading Ratchet and Drift leading Velocity out of the room before they can stop Skids from doing whatever it is he thinks he’s doing. Nautica eases him into a sitting position before grabbing his hand and squeezing it once, before she heads out.

“Tarn, how well did you keep up with him during the war?”

Megatron’s optics narrow but Skids continues without waiting for an answer. “I’m not saying that Autobots were innocents in the war, at any point, but Grindcore was on a level of its own. And it takes a particular kind of bot to be able to run that kind of prison. If you were always able to oversee and engage with those atrocities, you would be like Overlord. But to be completely calm, dangling hope over someone you used to love while they work in obliviousness to complete the painful last moments of his friends and fellow prisoners, all while believing that your actions are entirely in the right...that behavior has to be learned.”

Megatron’s face is lax and Skids smiles. “So, if you’ve got the time, I’ll let you know everything I can about Grindcore that Glitch left out of the reports. If I don’t end up making it, someone’ll need to tell Brainstorm what’s happened to Quark.”

There's multiple points in the course of the Lost Light's journey with Megatron where someone could point to hints or instances of character growth or true self-awareness, but this moment sticks out from them all with the dawning and ever growing look of horror, despair and regret playing on his face as Skids recounts every detail he can hold onto from Grindcore, servos unconsciously mirroring his movements during his repair work as the story unfolds. Day after day condensed into sentences until his hands still at the descriptor of the fire blazing, the music blasting, the lives moving from his shoulders to his hands as they all died. Quickly enough to be efficient, but slow enough to be excruciating. He moves backwards then, to the days with Glitch before either had even heard of Megatron. That’s the note he ends on. The tragedy before the gutting and masacre. 

“The worst part of it all...he’s dead. He’s dead and I didn’t get to even remember any of this until it was too late for me to do anything. I don’t know if he even knew I was still alive, or if he even cared. All I’m left with are the questions only he could answer and the blood that we both shared on our hands from that hell. I lost my faith, my friends, my trust in myself, my memories, and now my hope at peace, all because of a fool’s ideas and ambitions.” He’s not talking about Megatron, but the interpretation is certainly open.

Megatron stares off at nothing for a long moment. “None of us are who we were before all of this, changed by choice, force, or a mixture of both. The things I’ve done and encouraged all these years are my own and my own fault, but they don’t feel like me. The ideology I spread feels as foreign to me as my own frame some days and my actions will always come back to haunt me, no matter how I confront or avoid them.” He glances where Ravage lay alive only moments ago and says nothing more.

“The mistakes we make and what those mistakes become are two different things...when you try to make amends. I will never make up for my actions, but I can honor the memories of everyone I failed and try to help others, to make sure their memory lives on beyond a field of flowers.” Skids lowers his head for a moment before raising it again, a new spark ablaze in his optics. “Tarn took many things from me, one of them being my faith in a higher power, but through all of this I’ve kept my faith in the potential of the individual. I can see the worst of others and still manage to find when there is good, when the bad outweighs the good, and the other way around. All things considered? To me, you’ve become a good Autobot.

Megatron takes off Tarn’s mask from his chest where he stares at it, mulling over Skids’ words, before finally looking up and meeting Skids’ gaze with a new fire of his own.

“Megatron? Is that you?” It’s a voice unfamiliar to Skids, but one long missed for Megatron.

“Terminus?” He whispers, spinning around. Terminus’ frame looks completely unchanged, like they had last seen one another only seconds ago. The mask falls from his grip, the cannon dropping seconds later, both no longer even afterthoughts. He moves to take a step forward, before turning back to look at Skids, who’s now smiling.

“Go, I can tell you two have things you need to catch up on.” His smile drops slightly, becoming more bittersweet, yet sincere. “I think I might have it in me to keep going. To make amends. You should do the same.” He gestures to Terminus lightly.

Megatron nods and moves forward, not slowing as the sound of Tarn’s mask snapping and breaking under his pedes until he makes it right in front of Terminus and embraces him tightly.

Skids averts his gaze from the scene, happy to let them have as much privacy as they could. There was no real way to leave the room without drawing attention to himself, so he’s content to just stay put for the moment.

“Skids?” Now that voice, Skids knows.

Screw staying put. He races over in the voice’s direction and sees Roller towering above the many others. Skids stumbles into him, far from being back to a truly functioning capacity, only to be caught by steady and reliable and warm servos.

“Thought that was you, Skids! But you...you look like hell.” He looks at Skids in relief, at being around a safe and familiar face, and obvious concern.

“I feel like hell, honestly. But, I’m glad to see you. It’s been some time, after all. Maybe this is a good sign about the future.”

**Author's Note:**

> The ending for this is an extended version of the one in the zine, as a special treat to everyone ;^)  
> If you enjoyed it, consider leaving a kudos or comment! If you *really* enjoyed it, I'm @VHSVampires over on twitter and am Always down to talk about my emotions about Skids (who really Really deserved better)


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